Conservation is won or lost before the project begins. We design the ground it stands on.
What We Do
Restore Eden is a conservation governance design practice. It works with large ecosystem projects globally — from diagnosis through full project development —where the fundamental problem is not a shortage of conservation intent or ecological knowledge, but a failure of governance architecture.
The practice is built on one consistent finding from thirty years of field work across five continents: conservation projects fail at the design level. Governance architecture must precede finance instruments. Legitimacy must precede enforcement. Integration must precede scale. The work operates across two interconnected architectures — six practice services and seven intellectual pathways — each designed to address the governance failure at a different point in the project lifecycle and at a different scale of the problem.
Services
Conservation Governance Diagnostic
A structured diagnostic that reveals where conservation governance is failing and what it takes to redesign it.
Project Design
We design conservation governance systems built to last — from the ground up, or by rebuilding what the diagnostic shows isn't working.
Project Analysis and Evaluation
We evaluate whether your conservation project is actually working (not just delivering outputs) and tell you what to change.
Implementation Support and Management
We support your team through implementation, protecting governance design integrity as conditions shift and the system pushes back.
Full Project Development
We assemble a specialist team to build your conservation project end to end, from system portrait to lasting governance.
Capacity Building and Education
We train practitioners and institutions to design governance systems that reflect how complex socio-ecological systems actually behave.
Contact
If the work on this site connects with something you are designing, funding, or trying to understand, I would welcome the conversation.
